Opinion page editor Rick Holmes and other writers blog about national politics and issues. Holmes & Co. is a Blog for Independent Minds, a place for a free-flowing discussion of policy, news and opinion. This blog is the online cousin of the Opinion
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Opinion page editor Rick Holmes and other writers blog about national politics and issues. Holmes & Co. is a Blog for Independent Minds, a place for a free-flowing discussion of policy, news and opinion. This blog is the online cousin of the Opinion section of the MetroWest Daily News in Framingham, Mass. As such, our focus starts there and spreads to include Massachusetts, the nation and the world. Since successful blogs create communities of readers and writers, we hope the \x34& Co.\x34 will also come to include you.

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By Rob Meltzer

May 24, 2013
11:17 a.m.

There is one strong similarity between Watergate and the slime oozing out of the Obama White House that can’t be ignored.

Watergate created an interesting new cottage industry–the journalist polemic. I’ve never really been able to figure out why this happened exactly, although I blame it, in a large extent, to journalistic frustration with President Johnson over Vietnam. At some point, as Watergate began to break, and it became evident that the news media was on the enemies list, journalists began writing outstanding works of reportage, telling stories that could not be condensed to short spurts of newsprint. Washington insiders began to respond to these works of reportage, and a tidal wave of books deluged the public with sufficient information to really give the American people the ability to understand what Nixon was doing. I’ve also long since concluded that what brought down Nixon wasn’t the third rate burglary, but rather the total lack of credibility held by Nixon, which made two and a half more years of governance nearly impossible. I’ve been watching this trend for thirty years by weighing the books on my book shelf. Watergate takes up shelf after shelf. Iran/Contra takes up shelf after shelf.† Whitewater does not. And H.W. and Carter and Ford together comprise about four inches of paper.

But something has happened in the past six months–nearly 40 review copies have landed on my desk, mostly written by center/left journalists and academics, (hard-core Obama territory) which has begun to peel back a very sordid picture of the Obama Administration. Dirty Wars is one example, but I’ve got three review copies that have just arrived that detail the federalization of local police, known as the warrior cop phenomenon, and its not pretty. I’m not sure why this material is pouring out now, other than to say that I get a sense that media now seems to believe that is has been lied to by Obama for the past five years. In Dirty Wars, there is a story of how Obama interfered in the domestic affairs of Yemen, pressuring the government of Yemen to reverse the pardon of a journalist whose only crime was to report that one of Obama’s missile strikes had killed more than 40 Yemeni civilians. There seems to be a sense amongst journalists now that if the whole world is a battlefield and if Obama can kill Americans overseas, and if Obama is willing to lean on an allied nation to jail journalists for telling the truth, then no journalist in America is safe either. And then came the AP and Fox News scandals, the IRS scandal, the Presidential Bling scandal, and a sense that this president is not only untrustworthy and dishonest, but downright dangerous. At the rate we’re going, the books about Obama’s conduct are going to pass Watergate by early next year in terms of volume. Then we’ll see the counter-books, and maybe some tell-all books etc etc etc.

I’m not sure who Obama thought he was lying to yesterday in his big speech. The man has committed war crimes. That is a fact that absolutely cannot be disputed. Obama is a war criminal who has been given a Noble Peace Prize. And he thinks that the answer to his past war crimes is to replace the right front tire on the car. I’m sensing that both the American people and the American media are really tiring of the War on Terror, and I don’t think that they are happy with the excesses that Obama demonstrated. I don’t think people wanted to hear more lies from Obama yesterday. I don’t think they wanted to hear that Obama, the war criminal, didn’t know what was going on in his administration, or that he is going to tweak what he does in the future. You don’t erase the past by mild reform. If Hitler bought a puppy, it doesn’t erase the monstrous acts of his past.

In this way, Obama is worse than Nixon. Maybe Nixon engaged in war crimes in Vietnam and Cambodia, maybe not. But Obama has engaged in war crimes and treaty violations in more than 20 countries, and he has directly ordered the murder of more than 2000 people and at least four American citizens. For him to get up and essentially tell the people that he is not a crook is not enough. He needs to resign, or he needs to be impeached and removed from office. The Noble Committee should retract his award. And Obama’s next flight on Air Force One should be to the Hague to face justice for his crimes.